The financial reform bill is nothing but the biggest regulatory loophole in the history of regulation. The banks demanded and received the biggest transfer of assets from the public in history, with hardly any debate whatsoever.
Do read the whole thing, reflect on it, think about it, and then listen to any talking head brag about how good things are. Listen to anybody tell you the people spoke in November, and were heard by the landed gentry in DC. Oh, I say friends we’ve been had, hoodwinked, bamboozled, let astray, run amuck. Which is why I’ll say, again, until these two parties are run out of Washington, and some safeguards put in place to protect whatever parties replace them from the sharks, we haven’t solved and won’t solve our biggest problems.
The real reform that needs to take place is political.
BOSTON (MarketWatch) — This was the year America finally took on the power and greed of the Wall Street banks.
And the banks won.
They dodged the bullet of real reform, probably for all time. They bounced back to post huge profits, helped by legal theft from the middle class. They completed their takeover of both political parties — and bought themselves a new Congress even more pliable than the old one.
Middle-class America is flattened, devastated and broke. The bankers that caused it all have escaped punishment. They’re raking in huge profits. Oh, and the tax cuts just got extended for high earners, too!
It wasn’t anything about the eurobail, or the stock market. It didn’t have anything to do with the “flash crash,” or the audit of the Fed, or even Pizza Hut’s loopy pizza vote on Facebook. No, the most disturbing thing I read today was this, about the red giant, China:
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — China’s economy is teetering on the edge of a major slowdown, though it’s not a shakeout in the property market that’s about to spark the distress, according to a noted China strategist.
David Roche, an economic and political analyst who manages the Hong Kong-based hedge fund Independent Strategy, says the world’s third-largest economy is now on the brink, faced with the inevitable reckoning that follows an extended bank-lending binge.
“We’ve got the beginnings of a credit-bubble collapse in China,” said Roche, predicting the economy will likely cool from its stellar double-digit growth rate to a 6% annual expansion as a result.
A credit-bubble collapse in China. Yeah, that’s just what we need right about now. We had a credit collapse in the U.S., we just avoided one, I think, in Europe, and now China’s on verge of one? That’s just perfect. Isn’t China the country that’s supposed to lead us all out of this mess? And I thought it was just the developed world that was going to implode in an orgy of debt.
Healthcare stocks are leading the market today, as the healthcare bill winds its way through the Senate. Cigna, Aetna, Express Scripts leading the sector higher. MarketWatch’s Steve Gelsi breaks it down.
J.P. Morgan reported some strong earnings today. But what this bloggers eye were some of the sub-numbers in the earnings report. The bank booked $1.8 billion in investment banking fees. But don’t be fooled – that wasn’t from big M&A advising. But $429 million was in advisory fees. Instead, that $1.3 billion + remaining fees […]
David Oreck, founder of a well-known maker of vacuums and air purifiers, says he’s upset his namesake company is in bankruptcy. He says Nashville, Tenn.-based Oreck Corp. was a perfectly profitable company when he sold his stake in it to a private equity firm in 2004. He blames the firm, New York-based American Securities Capital […]
